Candidate · Ward 5 · Guelph · 2026
That's how we earn the room to invest in everything else.
Jon Christensen grew up going to school in Ward 5. Every school he attended sits inside it: University Village PS, College Avenue PS, Centennial CVI (Go Spartans), and the University of Guelph. This is the ward he knows best, and the neighbours he wants to go to work for.
The next four years will decide what your ward feels like in 2030. More than seven thousand new student beds are in the housing pipeline. The tree bylaw has to work in practice, not just on paper. And tax bills are running well ahead of wages.
He's running to do the careful operational work those decisions need, and to keep Guelph's rising costs from squeezing your family.
What Ward 5 needs
Ward 5 is unlike any other ward in Guelph: the University, the historic Old University neighbourhood, Stone Road Mall, Hanlon Creek, Village by the Arboretum, Campus Estates, and Mayfield Park, all at once. The next councillor will sit on years of decisions about how our community changes, and how it stays the same.
01
Yes to density on Gordon, Stone, Victoria, and College — that's where the city's Official Plan has always pointed. Established neighbourhoods deserve careful protection: the data work has to come before changing the rules again, and infrastructure has to keep pace with every new unit.
02
The U of G's 40-year real-estate vision could ultimately add around 4,000 student beds on its Ward 5 sites, with private projects pushing the pipeline well past that. Getting it right means a real partnership with the University, infrastructure that lands before the residences fill, and finally making Queen's Park pay its share.
03
Guelph property-tax bills have been running well ahead of inflation and wages, and you're feeling it. The fix isn't cutting the services you rely on. It's running the operating budget with discipline, so the room opens up to invest in housing, parks, transit, and the social services your neighbours need. That's how council gets back to making the investments residents are asking for.
New · A proposal for Guelph
It spent nothing making its own trail crossings safer — then closed one people use every day. Read Jon's fix, the Rail Corridor Safety Fund: safe, legal crossings paid for out of the railway's own profits, at no cost to taxpayers — including the exact motion he'll bring to council.
Read the proposal$2.4M
railway profit in 2025
$0
spent on crossings in 2025
$0
cost to Guelph taxpayers
Background
Twenty years of operations work: running restaurants at scale, a Guelph-based technology company, a Guelph-Wellington social-services board he chairs, a downtown small business he and his wife run. All of it has been the same job, basically: figuring out how complicated systems can serve the people inside them.
Read the full story
Co-founder
In 2020, Jon co-founded Bidmii, a marketplace and platform for home renovation. Homeowners' payments are held in trust and released milestone by milestone as work is completed. That's the model that quietly puts scam artists out of work. A major funding round was led by Scott McGillivray (HGTV, U of G alum). The company graduated Google for Startups Accelerator Canada in 2023, and the same year Jon was named Most Philanthropic CEO at the Tech4Giving Awards, the recognition by Tech for SickKids. Because it holds funds in trust, Bidmii is also regulated by the Bank of Canada as a registered Payment Service Provider.
Five-plus years on the board, three as chair
Hopewell supports children, youth, and adults with developmental disabilities, plus their families, across Guelph-Wellington. Over five years on the board, the last three as chair, Jon and his fellow directors learned the funding system inside and out, threaded the needle inside an existing provincial bureaucracy to put the organization on sustainable footing, and today it's growing: a new home opened in Ward 5 this April, more in the pipeline alongside the City of Guelph and County of Wellington, and people actively coming off the waitlist.
Small business owners
Jon and his wife opened a Firehouse Subs in Guelph's south end before the pandemic. When things got hard, they kept the doors open because their employees were breadwinners for their families. They sold the business on a high note and now own The Ten Spot downtown. They know what running a business in this city takes, and how municipal decisions like tearing up the downtown for years on end land on the small businesses that pay the rent.